Three of the protagonists of this story were already in June 2018. At dawn on June 27 of that year, more than a thousand national police and mossos d’esquadra simultaneously entered 74 homes in Alicante, Barcelona, ??Madrid and Valencia and arrested 130 people, accused of leading and integrating the Armenian mafia that had settled in Spain. The police operation was led by anti-corruption prosecutors Juan José Rosa and José Grinda and by the brave investigating judge of Terrassa, Jesús Iglesias. Five years later, the three have once again led a complicated and long investigation, also with the Mossos and the National Police, and the collaboration of the Georgia police and the FBI, in which the cells have once again been hit hard. of the Georgian mafia that was once again trying to raise its head as a dangerous criminal organization. An investigation that had a derivative in the United States, where three Georgians were arrested, at the same time as in Spain. Among the thirty arrested, most of them in Catalonia, but also one in Marbella, there are three “legal thieves” (vor zakonen).
Of the thirty people arrested on Monday, 14 will be available this Thursday in Court 2 of Terrassa, the one headed by Judge Iglesias, who started the investigations linked to the Eastern mafia in 2016. In January of that year, two people were arrested. murdered in an apartment in Terrassa, among them Gela Garishvili, considered one of those responsible for the Georgian mafia in Europe. The head of court number 2 of Terrassa took over the investigation and as soon as the victim’s criminal links were detected, the role of the public ministry was accepted by two anti-corruption prosecutors specialized in the Eastern mafias, established in Madrid that then, as now, They have traveled repeatedly to Catalonia to lead and coordinate research teams.
Those arrested were dedicated to all types of crimes. Investigators who have worked side by side for months have been able to prove a criminal organization in thirty robberies at homes, extortion, threats and coercion, money laundering, tobacco smuggling, reception, illicit possession of weapons and falsification of official documents. trade. During Monday’s entries, the investigators were accompanied in some of the arrests by prosecutor Rosa. That Thursday both Rosa and Grinda will be in Terrassa when the suspects are available.
The Criminal Investigation Division of the Mossos, specifically the central unit for transnational criminal organizations, the central unit for armed robberies, and the drugs and organized crime unit (Udyco) of the National Police worked in coordination with the FBI after Last year they reported how a Georgian law thief living in Catalonia was extorting an American who ran a business in Brooklyn, New York City.
